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WHEN ATI officially announced that the new Radeon 9800 Pro would use DDR-I, many people wondered if it could compete with Nvidia's Geforce FX and its DDR-II memory.
In hindsight, ATI's use of DDR-I will enable them to ship more boards with more memory at a lower price. Currently DDR-II chips above 400MHz are in short supply, which means high prices. Indeed, the Geforce FX is still nowhere in sight.

However, Nvidia's choice makes sense for them considering that they need faster RAM because their memory controller only supports a 128-bit interface, leaving them at a major bandwidth disadvantage. Their faster RAM helps to make up the difference.

ATI's Radeon 9700 and 9800 cards all use a 256-bit interface. Although 256-bit DDR-II chips are available, they too are in short supply and extremely expensive. ATI had a fully working Radeon 9800 with a DDR-II memory controller in the labs a few months ago, and of course ATI has already demonstrated a Radeon 9700 Pro back in October 2002 with a DDR-II interface.

Now, at least one major ATI Add-In-Board (AIB) partner is considering the use of DDR-II chips to provide them with the performance crown. As ATI and Nvidia know, having the top graphics card means prestige and more sales of the bread and butter consumer cards.

Only a limited number of these cards with 256MB of DDR-II RAM will be produced and sold. The MSRP for these is estimated at $599 USD.

An unconfirmed report regarding another AIB partner states that they are investigating the use of 256MB of 128-bit chips and using a "dual-channel" approach. This would lead to no actual performance benefit, and most likely will lead to decreased performance. However, just being able to say that they are using DDR-II may mean more sales to the unsuspecting consumer.Inq

"Someone" reveals that the R400 is completely off the roadmap, probably due to too high cost using current process technology. A MAXX-style R3xx implementation is possible to remain competitive, though. Renaming something to R400 to save face? Who knows.

Ut oh. Maybe nVidia did make the right choices after all. Sacrificing the n30 in favor of future scalability while ATI went the shortterm route. Hmm... well we'll have to see. GL ta both companies, we want ya both healthy!

Here's a little more information on the 256mb version leaked by a guy said to work in ATi's Quality Assurance and Testing Department. (except for details enclosed in brackets)

All ATi R9800 cores will run @ 380MHz, but are certified with FCC to run @ 400MHz.
(At least FIC's 9800 256MB will run @ 400/460MHz core/memory)
The cards will use 2.6ns DDR-II memory from either Samsung or Hynix, probably depending on which brand of card.
The card will be available from the beginning of May, and will be shipped with Catalyst 3.4's.
9800 256MB will cost ~$100 (US) more than 128MB version.

Optimization of the physical design to allow higher core frequency (380Mhz) Improvement in efficiency of memory access
Pixel Shader supports infinite conversion of the number of orders ATi has modified the GPU physical design to allow for higher core frequency instead of finer process technology (0.13). Radeon 9800 Pro not equipping with GDDR2 initially is because of the high cost and high thermal dissipation. GDDR2 is running at 2.5V Vdd although Vddq is at 1.8V and with 1Ghz memory frequency, you can expect large amount of heat to be produced. If Radeon 9800 Pro uses GDDR2 memory now, a heat spreader would be required for the memory and you can expect a cooling system like the FlowFX of the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. However, due to limitation of GDDR-I memory frequency which can hardly scale up anymore, DDR2 is the only way to go and Radeon 9800 Pro is expected to be fitted with 256MB of GDDR2 towards second half of the year when Samsung GDDR2 1.4Ghz is ready for sampling. ATi also has re-designed the memory controller of the Radeon 9800 Pro to improve memory access by decreasing the frequency of reading and writing of memory. From our sources, Triplex is said to be sampling their Radeon cards with GDDR2 technology now so it will be interesting to see how much boost will they get from the cards.